A phone call in May from a friend in pain drew Reyah Carlson back to the Upper Valley. The next day she left her home in Connecticut and has not looked back.

Carlson's friend, Mary Gilbert of Bradford, Vt., suffers from lupus, a chronic immune system disorder. For several years, the joint inflammation caused by the disease would flare up for a few days and then go away. But by the time she called Carlson, that pattern had changed for the worse.

“I was in chronic flare,” said Gilbert, 45. “You get to a place with the pain where you just can't get on top of it.”

Since receiving a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis around seven years ago, Carlson, who is 51, has been using the stings of live honeybees to treat MS, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and other conditions. Her own health has improved dramatically, and she has seen high rates of success among the roughly 2,000 people who have sought her help in places where she previously lived in California, Missouri and Indiana, she said.

“Most people say they wish they had done it earlier,” Carlson said. “It's like a last ditch effort.”

Bee venom therapy, also called apitherapy, is considered an unproven, alternative treatment in the United States, though the practice has a long history in the folk medicines of Asia and Eastern Europe and is offered in medical settings in Korea, China, Russia and Ukraine.

Analyses of honeybee venom have shown it contains the chemicals melittin and apamine, both of which are known to have anti-inflammatory properties.

“There is certainly some biological mechanism behind it,” said Robert Zurier, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He authored a 1973 study that found that arthritis did not worsen in a group rats given skin injections of bee venom, while it did in a group treated with saline. The venom appears to act by stimulating the adrenal gland to increase the body's natural production of corticosteroids, he said.

There have been only a handful of high quality published clinical trials on the use of bee venom for arthritis or for MS. They have all involved fewer than 100 people and have had mixed results, leading groups such as the National Multiple Sclerosis Society to call bee venom therapy “ineffective and unsafe.”

One review of the literature on unconventional treatments for multiple sclerosis by pharmacists at the University of Manitoba published in the journal Neurology in September 2008 concluded that most studies had been “sub-optimal” and that the potential for severe allergic reaction had curtailed its widespread use.

Carlson first learned about apitherapy while living and keeping bees in Vershire in the late 1980s. A local man, who was being treated for MS by the late Middlebury, Vt., beekeeper and bee venom apostle Charles Mraz, asked her to help him set up a hive on his property.

Mraz, Carlson and other practitioners also promote other honeybee products including propolis, beeswax and royal jelly, which they say have healthful properties that can help fight infections or reduce the side effects of chemotherapy, to name just a few.

Carlson points to “tons and tons of anecdotal evidence” for the value of bee venom therapy.

She believes there may never be a large enough clinical study to prove its worth in the treatment of arthritis or MS because there is no profit in it. “You cannot put a patent on bee venom,” she said.

Carlson learned her stinging technique in 2002 at a summer course sponsored by the American Apitherapy Society, a group founded by Mraz. She delivers stings to a localized region where a person feels pain such as the lower back or the knee.

The position of the stinging and the number of stings depends on the problem, ranging from two to four stings on the wrists for carpal tunnel syndrome to 20 stings at a time along the spine for more generalized chronic conditions such as MS.

She picks a bee out of a jar with one hand using locking forceps and holds its stinger down over her target. Then she taps the bee's abdomen with the index finger of her other hand, which prompts it to sting. The bee is killed, but she thanks it for its service.

The method starts with a small number of stings to test for allergic reaction and keeps antihistamine and an injector of epinephrine nearby, though she said she has never had to use the epinephrine.

Another form of apitherapy, called hoshindo, removes stingers from the bees prior to treatment and applies them manually along the body's meridian lines according to traditional acupuncture.

When Carlson arrived in the Upper Valley six weeks ago, she began a regimen for Gilbert of six to 14 bee stings each day, three days a week. She felt results within a few weeks.

“I just ran down the stairs one morning and didn't notice it,” Gilbert said. She has more mobility and a better sense of control over the disease, she said.

Now, Carlson is settling into a home in West Newbury, renting from another woman, Hope Saunders, whom she is treating. She has set up two beehives in the backyard to supply her with live honeybees and bee products and hopes to expand her client base beyond the 16 people she is currently seeing.

She charges $75 for an initial visit and sets up individual arrangements for the regular appointments depending on what people are able to pay.

Also, Carlson will be giving a free public talk and demonstration of bee venom therapy at the Orange East Senior Center in Bradford on July 27 at 11 a.m.

Bee venom therapy is not something that Dawn Isherwood, a health educator with the Lupus Foundation of America in Washington D.C., gets many inquiries about, she said. But lupus sufferers often seek alternative or complementary therapy because of the side effects of mainstream medicine and the frustratingly unpredictable nature of the condition, she said.

While the foundation does not try to dissuade patients, it does advise speaking to your regular doctor about the treatment before proceeding.

“It is certainly wise to talk to their rheumatologist or other doctor to make sure there is no interference with their (regular) treatment,” Isherwood said.